No Need For Speed: Driving Safety 101

Flying down the highway, you take a glance down at your speedometer. You’re going 85 miles per hour, but- who cares?

You’re with your friends and none of them are wearing their seatbelts, so why should you? Feeling a spike of adrenaline rush through your body, you know that you should slow down. You’ve come to the conclusion that you should slow down, but..you were going so fast that you hadn’t been able to see the warning sign a half a mile back.

It was the sign indicating that there was a sharp curve ahead.

By the time that you’re slamming on the breaks, you suddenly realize that you’ve lost control of the vehicle as you swing around the curve. The car immediately starts fishtailing from the high speed it’s been at and just like that-

You’re another statistic. Another newspaper article.

This is the sad reality of many teen fatalities that occur in the United States. The average amount of teens that die per day due to car crashes is at a total of 8. There are many factors that influence the decision a teen driver makes, some including; peer pressure, drug or alcohol use and something that is totally undermined- the rush that teens get from adrenaline. The age group must susceptible to being in crashes is 16 through 19 year olds. At that age range, brains are not fully developed. In fact, brains do not finish developing until mid- to- late twenties. The moment that you sit down in the drivers seat of a vehicle, you are automatically taking

responsibility for your life, your passengers lives, the life of pedestrians and also other drivers around you. Teens sometimes don’t even have the ability to take responsibility for their own actions.

So, the question is, why do we allow teens to drive despite all this? It’s because independency at this stage in life is crucial. For example, the way that with each grade we get more independence. Elementary, we are really monitored. Middle school, we have more freedom and highschool; this is the last stage before adulthood. Instead of restricting teens from being able to drive, they are mandated driver’s education in hopes that it will structure them enough to be a safe driver on the road. In most instances, this does not work.

In the state of Delaware, underage drivers are mandated to attend driver’s education class. In order to pass the class, they must be in- class for at least 30 hours, do 8 hours of in- car instruction and pass two major tests with at least a 70%. The most effective proven process had been the GDL (Graduated Driving License). This is a permit granted to students who pass all the required steps and are awarded a blue certification to turn into the DMV. With this permit, you must undergo 6 months of supervised driving with 50 hours of driving, and 10 hours of night. It has been determined that after this system was put into place that crash rates for drivers decreased by 30.8% Despite this lengthy process, there are some flaws in this system. They may have proven to be test smart and demonstrated good driving behaviors in front of the instructor, though will they really make those same decisions in the instance that they’re alone or with their friends? The requirement of 50 hours of driving- who’s to say that they aren’t forging the times and turning it into their drivers education teacher to continue onto their second six months? The point of the 50 hours of supervised driving is that this time frame is for them to apply everything that they’ve learned in class with the supervision of a licensed driver. The flaw isn’t always with the education, sometimes it is with the students and sometimes the parents themselves. A licensed driver doesn’t mean a responsible or safe driver. If that was the case there wouldn’t be around 5 to 6.3 million deaths in the United States per year.

So now, you may be wondering- if not even driving education is proven completely effective to reducing the number of car related fatalities..is anything effective?

The most effective way of reducing these fatalities is starting with yourself and the people around you. You can’t control the action of strangers, you can control the actions of people in your community and your relatives. First and foremost, put down your phone. Turn off your notifications, put it in the backseat. Whatever you need to do to resist the temptation of glancing down at your phone- do it. If my words alone aren’t convincing enough to do so, consider the studies of Indiana Department of Labor. Their research has proven that your reaction time will be about 30% worse while trying to text and drive. In a average of 10% of that time, it is determined that drivers will be out of their lane. Drifting out of your lane into another lane of incoming traffic is a huge mistake as well as a avoidable one. Just put down your phone.

Moving onto the next effective way of reducing car accident fatalities is using the safety mechanism your car already has in place for you. Don’t try to look cool in front of your friends and don’t tolerate even your own parents not doing this; put on a seatbelt. Seriously, this could be the factor that determines whether you live or die in the case of a car crash. You see, there is something called “Room To Live” involved in the designing of vehicles. To give a brief summary, “Room To Live” is a movie created by a Michigan State Police officer named Sargent Ware to demonstrate how wearing a seatbelt can actually be the determining factor whether you live or not in a car crash. He explains a few different scenarios to show the psychics behind the impact of wearing a seatbelt. A example of one of his scenarios is that he tells the crowd to paint a large “X” on their house and then go back to their property line. Once they are back on their property line, he tells them to run as fast as they can towards the “X” with their arms up. Now, let’s looks at the phenomenon behind what he told them to do. The fastest a person can run is 28 miles per hour if they’re- Usain Bolt. For the average person, they are well below the 20’s in how fast they can run per mile. If a person ran their fastest at a cement wall with their arms out, their arms would break. A average speed that a person drives is 45 miles per hour on a road. You can’t save yourself. The only thing that will prevent you front flying forward through the windshield is your seatbelt. If every person were responsible enough to put on their seatbelt, this would reduce the numbers of deaths drastically. To add onto this- do you know that your passengers not wearing a seatbelt could actually kill you? Even if you are wearing your seatbelt, The University of Buffalo has conducted a study that proves passengers who aren’t wearing seatbelts could be fatal to the driver. If a driver slams on their breaks, the passengers in the backseat can fly forward which has been revealed to increase the odds of death for the passengers three times as much and also increase the odds of dying for the driver twice as much.

Please, just put on your seatbelts.

I, personally have never experienced being in a car wreckage and hope not to. There has been a few instances where unsafe driving behavior has been demonstrated to me. Before the concept of this essay, I’ve never paid much attention to the statistics and high rates that a task we deem as ‘small’ can cause. This essay alone has educated me, and I hope it educates others reading this. These facts give me a gateway to convincing my parents of safe driving and those around me. To be a safe driver, you need to start with yourself. Especially if you have younger siblings in the car or people who are easily influenced, if you practice safe driving behaviors it increases the chance that they will do the same. Always have your seatbelt on, stay with the speed limit and most important, remember this;

You never know who your actions can effect. The person that you hit head on because you were selfishly speeding can end up being the best friend of somebody that you know. As a driver, you have a responsibility to keep yourself and others on the road safe. Driving itself is a privilege, not a right. Something that is a right is the right to live. Don’t be the one to take this away from someone.